On the first Tuesday in March, 1981, when I was a Senior Policy Advisor at the White House, I astounded and angered my staff superiors by heading home to Vermont once again to preside over our town meeting. Having no knowledge of such a thing, they were simply unable to understand how important it was to me to be a part of my small town's democratic process. In fact, there was a broad hint that if it was that important to me, the White House could find somebody else to do my work. I would have considered it an honor to have been dismissed from a senior White House job because of my reason for returning to Vermont, but it never quite came to that. Not long ago I was browsing through one of those World Library books published by "Life" magazine back in the '60s; it was the volume on Switzerland. As a believer in town meeting democracy, I naturally paid close attention when the book described the traditional Landsgemeinde, the annual popular assembly through which the citizens of three of Switzerland's 25 cantons (mini-states) still govern themselves.

     It is the first Sunday of May in the mountain canton of Glarus, where the Landsgemeinde has met every year since 1387. The village square is festooned with the red and white flag of Switzerland and the canton's own red flag with the figure of its patron saint, St. Fridolin. At 9 o'clock in the morning the churchbells ring. The town's brass band strikes up a march, and a parade moves toward the square. It includes the canton's judges, counsellors and public officials. There is also a uniformed detachment from the canton's militia, to which every male citizen must belong from age 20 to 60.

     The counselors, led by the Cantonal President, advance to the speaker's platform. Arrayed before them on wooden benches are 6,000 men of Glarus. In the front rows are the boys aged 12-20, too young to vote, but who nonetheless are given the best seats as a way of training them in the responsibilities of citizen self-government. (Women still do not have the vote in local elections in Glarus.) All 6,000 men rise to take the constitutional oath to support, with their lives if necessary, the freedom and independence of Glarus. The public officials are elected. The freemen debate for three hours over 21 legislative proposals. Finally, the business done, the Landsgemeinde is adjourned, and the citizens refresh old acquaintances – and themselves – in the village taverns. That evening all go the Glarus Fair.

     Quaint, but hopelessly out of date? Perhaps. But the concluding sentences of the book's account provide much food for thought. "The spirit of these popular assemblies is less that of a philosophical discussion than of a conclave of armed warriors proclaiming their individual liberties. In the canton of Appenzell, even today, the voters carry swords as a symbol of their status as free men with a right to vote and bear arms."

     These sentences describe precisely the kind of spirit that our American forefathers hoped would pervade their new republic. The political thinkers of our own Revolutionary Era, particularly Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams and James Madison, had a grand vision of what America might become if it could avoid the calamities which had overtaken Europe. Chief among those calamities was something they called "corruption," but it didn't mean quite what we mean by the term today.

     To these 18th century Americans, corruption meant much more than individual graft or bribe-taking. It meant the loss of civic virtue among the mass of the people. Corruption occurred when the freemen became dependent upon privilege conferred by the state, or became the pawns of those in control of the state or its privileged institutions. To maintain the ideal republic and counter the trend toward corruption, our forefathers thought, a number of conditions were necessary.

     The dominant force in any true republic had to be truly independent citizens. Their economic base had to be anchored in private property, and in that day that meant ownership over productive natural resources – principally agricultural land, but also minerals, forests and fishing boats. If too many citizens became dependent for their livelihood on the favors of the great dukes and barons and merchant princes for their livelihood, the republic would slide down into serfdom and corruption.

     There was also a political component. Citizens of a republic had to practice and replenish their civic virtue by participating in self-government, especially at the local level, where most legitimate functions of government should be carried out. That meant popular democracy, as opposed to aristocracy or monarchy in which government was the province of a small elite of lords and nobles.

     Finally, to preserve the republic and their liberties, freemen had to be armed. The US Founding Fathers were horrified at the thought of a standing army, quartered among the people, owing its allegiance to the head of state, paid from his treasury, and enforcing his edicts upon the freemen. From ample European experience, the Founding Fathers knew that such a body always posed a threat to liberty and to democratic institutions. The only safe means of defending a republic was the citizen militia, composed of armed freeholders and organized by local governments in which they themselves have political control.

     James Madison made this point in the Federalist Papers (No. 46), when he observed: "Were the (armed) people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will, and direct the national force; and of officers appointed out of the milita, by these governments and attached both to them and to the milita, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned, in spite of the legions which surround it."

     To the Founding Fathers, then, the essential ingredients for a republic of civic virtue were economic, political and military. That republic would be founded on the independent property owner, who participated democratically in self-government, and who was armed to stand against tyranny and oppression. In the Old World, the Founding Fathers thought, corruption had progressed to the point that this ideal could no longer be achieved. But in the New World, that path toward liberty and virtue was still open, and Americans could make their new nation the leader of the world by following it.

     And thus these principles were enshrined in the American Constitution and Bill of Rights. The people were given the democratic right to choose the House of Representatives directly and the Senate indirectly. Congress was required to guarantee to every State a republican form of government. Congress could not invade the human right of property ownership by violating contracts, or by taking private property for public use without just compensation. And the right to bear arms was protected by the famous language of the Second Amendment: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Now more than 200 years after the signing of the Constitution, we ought never to lose sight of the principles that animated its draftsmen during that long summer of 1787.

     Many arguments have been made in favor of gun ownership, constructed in most cases on the individual's right to defend himself and his family, and the threat to our liberties posed by a government intent on enforcing stringent gun regulations against its people. I always have found those arguments persuasive, but to me, the right to gun ownership can be justified convincingly by a wholly different kind of argument.

     We all know that in the 20th century a citizen militia is not a practical answer to America's national defense needs. We have to maintain a strong, professional military force, however much it might distress the shades of Jefferson, Madison and Adams. But the right of every citizen to own a gun, coupled with the civic duty to spring to the defense of our country's liberties, is an indispensable symbolic component of a vital American tradition that helps to define who we are as a people. In the deep subconscious of the American citizen soldier, gun ownership is linked to private property ownership, economic independence, democratic self-government, the preservation of his country's independence and the liberty of its people. And so we have come full circle. The land-owning citizen warrior of a Swiss canton wearing a ceremonial sword to his local government assembly illustrates perfectly the vision our own Founding Fathers held for America. It is a vision that, however subconsciously, also motivates the free American today. Every time the right to bear arms is eroded, that vision begins to fade. Every time that great right is reaffirmed, a vital ingredient of the spirit of America is strengthened.